Those who find evolution convincing need to rethink it a lot more carefully because the evidence is really not there to the extent you think it is. I suspect you are accepting as evidence all sorts of assumptions, speculations and hypotheses that are not evidence, and are taking most of it on faith in spite of yourself.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

The idea that the Flood can be seen in the worldwide strata but only in SOME of the strata, above which the strata and their fossil contents were not caused by that event, is just silly. Creationists who entertain such ideas need to rethink them.

Such extensive thick layers of discrete sediments could not have been formed any other way, nor could their fossils have formed either except as a result of the Flood. There is no difference whatever in either the deposition of the layers or the way fossils occur in them at any level -- the same event produced them all.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

The largest fossil spider uncovered to date once ensnared prey back in the age of dinosaurs, scientists find.

Here we have the scientists spinning their fantasy as usual, of course, since there is no way to falsify it.

OF COURSE it snared prey in the time of the dinosaurs, since it was fossilized as a result of the Flood and the dinosaurs ALSO lived before the Flood and were buried in prodigious numbers during that event.

Too bad the spider fossil wasn't found in a Precambrian layer (not that they couldn't invent some rationalization for that) but the Flood did sort things in a way that put land creatures in the higher levels, so its location isn't enough to jolt anyone out of their illusions, just unusual enough to get it called the "oldest" known specimen.

The spider, named Nephila jurassica, was discovered buried in ancient volcanic ash in Inner Mongolia, China. Tufts of hairlike fibers seen on its legs showed this 165-million-year-old arachnid to be the oldest known species of the largest web-weaving spiders alive today — the golden orb-weavers, or Nephila, which are big enough to catch birds and bats, and use silk that shines like gold in the sunlight.

The fossil was about as large as its modern relatives,

Well, since IN REALITY they're only about 4500 years apart, that isn't surprising.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Opportunely enough, details of a new intermediate form, Liaoconodon hui, have just been published.

Some details here:

The new genus and species described by Meng et al. comes form the exquisitely preserved Jehol biota of Liaoning, and shows the last tenuous connection between the mammalian ear ossicles and the lower jaw, via Meckel’s cartilage, an ancient part of the lower jaw lying along the medial surface of the dentary. They refer to it as a “transitional mammalian middle ear”, the transition being between the mandibular middle ear (i.e. attached to the lower jaw) of the earliest mammals (and most advanced reptiles), and the definitive mammalian middle ear present in the adults of all extant mammals, in which there is no persistent connection between the middle ear and the lower jaw.

Now in modern mammals Meckel's cartilage disappears during embryological development:

Living mammals, including humans, have Meckel's cartilage as embryos, but it disappears as they mature. In the L. hui fossil - an adult - it is ossified and the fossil shows how it supported some of the post-dentary bones as they shifted into the ear.

This is more evidence for the evolution of this irreducibly complex structure.

Meanwhile, creationists continue to attribute this sort of structure to entirely unknown and unevidenced processes; and this they do based only on not being able to see how this sort of thing evolved --- despite the fact that, dammit, we can.

Look, you believe life evolves so something like this is evidence to your mind, although it is only evidence because it fits with your theory, not the kind of evidence that actually proves anything. It's just another of those plausibilities that the whole theory is built of, just an exercise in recognizing structural analogues.

Since I do not believe life evolves, except for variations within a species, such phenomena are simply examples of design similarities that occur everywhere in nature. Its function in the embryo may be quite different than Evo theory makes of it, you're simply smugly content with a facile explanation that fits with the theory, and of course there is no way to falsify such an explanation so you have no fear that anything a creationist might say could unsettle your certainty.

And, we CAN "see how this sort of thing evolved" BASED ON YOUR ASSUMPTION THAT IT DID. We can "see" the same thing you see, we simply recognize that it's nothing but another imaginative construction and not evidence in the true sense at all.

Also, you ask us to take a lot for granted even in the description of the evidence. You ask us to believe that this really is the same cartilage in all the examples you mention though you provide no photographs to demonstrate it, that it occurs in the embryos of mammals and humans -- does it look exactly the same? Are you sure it's the same structure? -- and that it later "disappears," and that its function is as you describe with relation to dental development. Hey, maybe it is, but as I recall, a famous propagator of the "Biogenetic Law," Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, which my generation was raised on, had so fudged the illustrations he offered in proof of his thesis that eventually they were recognized as fraud -- all in the service of proving his belief in that principle and in evolution itself.

Yet we're still only presented with raw descriptions such as the above and not shown anything that would allow us to judge for ourselves whether the researchers are interpreting the phenomena correctly or perhaps imposing their own bias on the data -- fudging a bit here and there.

In any case, the occurrence of any particular structure across many species doesn't prove evolution, merely design similarity.

Oh, and terms like "ancient" and "modern" -- as well as "intermediate" -- are also interpretive bias imposed on the data. A species of word magic.

Evolutionary "science" is really laughable when you take the time to ask the right questions.

Friday, April 1, 2011

We can therefore define the core of a functionally integrated system as those parts that are indispensable to the system’s basic function: remove parts of the core, and you can’t recover the system’s basic function from the other remaining parts. To say that a core is irreducible is then to say that no other systems with substantially simpler cores can perform the system’s basic function.[...] To determine whether a system is irreducibly complex therefore employs two approaches [...] A conceptual analysis of the system, and specifically of those parts whose removal renders the basic function unrecoverable, to demonstrate that no system with (substantially) fewer parts exhibits the basic function. [...] The problem is that for an irreducibly complex system, its basic function is attained only when all components from the irreducible core are in place simultaneously. It follows that if natural selection is going to select for the function of an irreducibly complex system, it has to produce the irreducible core all at once or not at all.

But no, to say that a core is irreducible is not to say that "no other systems with substantially simpler cores can perform the system’s basic function".

What it actually means is that if we tried to simplify the system by completely removing one of its parts and leaving it otherwise the same, then it would no longer fulfill its "basic function".

Let us again consider humans as an example. Remove either the brain or the body, and we are no longer able to perform the evolutionarily essential functions of survival and reproduction.

But that does not mean that no simpler system than a human being can perform these functions, because in fact we know of many such systems, including systems which don't have brains in the slightest.

So he is wrong when he says: "It follows that if natural selection is going to select for the function of an irreducibly complex system, it has to produce the irreducible core all at once or not at all." We do not in fact have to have a brain-body system produced at one stroke at the outset. Instead we can envisage a process in which, as evolutionists actually claim, we begin with an organism that has no brain and end up with an organism to which the brain is indispensable.

There are other problems with his paper, but the most obvious problem is that he's making the same old mistake. Until the IDers correct this, then their argument is flawed --- and if they do correct this, then they won't have an argument.

I dunno. Dr. Adequate is a genius and all but isn't there something - uh - deceptive - about this example? A bit of the old evolutionist flimflam here? "Survival and reproduction" does not merely define the output of MANY living systems, let alone any particular living system, it defines ALL living systems, every last one of them. Isn't this no more than a stupendously extreme case of begging the question?

But Behe's famous example is the bacterial rotator flagellum, whose function is a bit more specific than "survival and reproduction." It is CLAIMED that other simpler systems exist which demonstrate that the whole doesn't need to have come together all at once, a claim based as usual on envisaging hypothetical steps by which it could have evolved, and I'd simply like to point out that telling term "envisage" here with its inevitable couldawoulda entourage.

Envisaging is of course what Evolution is made of. It has no true scientific credentials beyond envisaging -- imagining, inventing, hypothesizing -- Fantasy. They can never get past this level of scientific inquiry as true science can by producing actual evidence for or against their imaginative construct.

Evolutionists are perpetually stuck at the Hypothesis level. They can always ONLY envisage their evidence, make it up out of whole cloth with a bit of pseudologic to hold it together. That's the entire Theory of Evolution from beginning to end. It's the entire debate in fact. The one who wins the debate is the one who is the best at aggressive ridicule.

In this particular case Dr. A has envisaged an exceptionally laughable answer to his debate opponent.

2 Peter 3:3-7 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as [they were] from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water. Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

MOST IMPORTANT BLOG POSTS

There's something very wrong with the thinking of a Christian who is more worried about being "fooled by God" in an erroneous judgment about, say, a radiometric dating conclusion than he is about being "fooled by God" in the Bible, very wrong because Christians supposedly believe the Bible to be inspired by God, but science is done by fallible human beings.===========================

You want me to respect science. How can I respect Geology when it accepts the idea that a worldwide stack of different kinds of sedimentary rock represents different time periods of millions of years each, and that the bazillions of catastrophically tossed and tumbled dead things contained in them, often in batches of their own kind, represent particular life forms that lived in each "time" period -- all while smugly proclaiming "there is no evidence" for a global Flood. This is so stupid it is amazing that it was ever entertained, but there it is, today's Dogma of Geology. I'm sure they do solid science in spite of it of course, kind of around and under and between it.

EVOLUTIONISM IS A STRONGHOLD TO BE SPIRITUALLY TOPPLED

2 Corinthians 10:3-5 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

PRAY IT DOWN!

About This Blog

What I want to do here is try to do my best job of stating my own favorite arguments against evolution. There are a couple I think really, logically speaking, ought to bring the whole system crashing down but of course it isn't that easy, human stubbornness being what it is.

There's the geological argument which is basically that you can see with your naked eyes that this world once went through a global Flood, as the Bible reports. That takes care all by itself of the whole Old Earth theorizing that evolution depends on.

And there's the biological argument: It is known that genes DON'T increase although evolution depends on increase. The MORE evolved a species the LESS genetic capacity to evolve it actually has. Breeders certainly know this; and conservationists also know this because genetic depletion in highly specialized species (such as the cheetah) makes them vulnerable to extinction rather than candidates for further variation.

I hope to post on these and other arguments as time permits.

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Ah heck, Mr. Dawkins, we CAN TOO imagine macroevolution by natural selection, same as you can. We can follow out the same Rube-Goldberg sequence of improbable events, acting in a homologically graded series of imaginatively fleshed-out fossils, events that have never been observed in living reality, to the same preconceived conclusion you come to. Our problem is that we know it flies in the face of probability, reason, logic and any other law of rational inquiry and science that may exist, AND that there is no evidence for it, whereas design OBVIOUSLY implies a designer -- obviously, intuitively, rationally, logically, reasonably and probabilistically -- and I'd add "absolutely" if I could get away with it.

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Thinking about the implications of the Biblical creation can sometimes draw you close to God in a way that has to be described as worship. That's the main reason for doing it I think.

IT ISN'T FOR LACK OF EXPOSURE TO SCIENCE

A description of my own experience in answer to the usual denigrating assumption that creationism requires ignorance of science -- not that I claim any scientific sophistication of course, merely a basic understanding of some basic facts and principles.Before I became a Christian I absorbed a lot of the thinking about evolution and tried my best to understand it. Even then I was often frustrated thatevidence trails could just about never be found or followed out to any kind of certainty and I found that I always had to give up trying to follow them and just take the conclusions of the scientists pretty much on faith.I definitely had an interest in understanding evolution. I believed in it; I wanted also to understand it, but I found my desire thwarted by the lack of evidence. Iread the Origin of Species, I read lots of stuff by Stephen Jay Gould, very entertaining stuff, I read Skeptical Inquiry regularly, and so on. I investigated the science claims for evolution about as far as the average intelligent non-scientist can be expected to.

It was only after I became a Christian that I got into studying the creationist answers and took seriously my earlier experience offrustration with the lack of evidence for evolution.I strongly wish that those who find it convincing would rethink it a lot more carefully because the evidence is really not there to the extent you think it is, I suspect you are accepting as evidence all sorts of clever speculations that are not evidence, and are taking most of it on faith in spite of yourself.